2019: The Year in review

Last year I wrote a list of things I wanted to achieve in 2019. So I thought why not I write a blog post every year-end about what I did throughout the year.

This post will be really helpful when I look back and think about what I did and how much I learned every year etc.

Summary of the year:

• Read 5 books (Reading my last book Atomic Habits).
• I started running 🏃🏻‍♂️ regularly. So far I have run around 150km.
• Started playing football and badminton.
• Delivered 5 talks.
• Started Waking up early on weekdays (6 AM) (This is my keystone habit).
• I wrote only 1 post 🤪 this year (lazy me).
• Took 3 long breaks (This post is written on the 4th break).
• Contributed to 2 Open Source Projects.
• Created a couple of Open Source Projects.
• Curated & Maintained a newsletter.

My blog posts

I wrote only 1 article in 2019 😆. In 2020, I am planning to write at least 1 article per month 😬.

Few blogs I frequent visit:

1. http://dev.to
2. https://web.dev
3. https://v8.dev
4. http://kentcdodds.com
5. http://overreacted.io
6. https://css-tricks.com

I also maintain a git repo called Today I Liked which has all the articles I read throughout this year.

Open Source Projects

• Habits Tracker - Habits tracker app, I got this idea from siddharth kp and took the design from Aleksey Tsvetkov.

• Teardown - 💣 Teardown the published project in surge.sh via command line.

• React Hooks Accordion - A simple accordion using react hooks 🤪.

• Awesome Web Newsletters - 🔥 List of awesome web-related newsletter to subscribe.

• Tic Tac Toe - Dumbest tic tac toe game ever built using react hooks :P.

• Generate Newsletter - Newsletter template generator for This Week In Web newsletter. Co-creator is my friend shidhin.

• Useful npx Commands - List of useful npx commands I use regularly but not ready to install globally 🤨.

I have more OSS projects in my GitHub, in which some are half baked/just ideas and some are completed fully but in private repo.

More open-source projects can be found here.

Git streaks

Once my wise friend Hemanth told me that git streaks are just gimmicky and all it does is put stress on you and that he stopped doing it. I wanted to stop as well and take breaks whenever I can and I need to.

Hence my streaks look like this.

But now looking back I took a lot of breaks 🙄😆 and feel great about it.

Newsletter

Along with my friends Shidhin and Hemanth, we redesigned & rebranded our newsletter (previously known as pwa.tips) as this week in web.

Name is heavily inspired from this week in react newsletter from Philipp Spiess do check out his newsletter.

As of today, our newsletter has 570+ subscribers. We have subscribers all around the world (USA, Germany, India, Turkey, Japan, etc).

And our top readers are from USA.

Things we use for our newsletter

• Gatsby - Gatsby is a free and open-source framework based on React.
• Generate Newletter and along with google sheet to generate newsletter template which hardly takes 2 mins.
• Mailchimp - Mailchimp is free up to 2k subscribers.

Talks

1. Technical Committee 39 (TC39) on Aug 14 - Bangalore, Thoughworks - UI Catchup
2. Intro to ReactJS in 2019 on July 29 - Bangalore, Thoughworks - Office Level
3. Serverless for Frontend Developers on July 11 - Bangalore, Thoughworks - UI Catchup
4. Performance Budgeting on May 11 - Bangalore, Paypal - Office PaypalJs
5. Let's Talk Web Performance on Apr 07 - Bangalore, Thoughworks - UnFold UI

Books I read

• Power Of Habits - Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
• Only Time Will Tell - The epic tale of Harry Clifton’s life begins in 1920.
• Sapiens - A Brief History of Humankind
• Kathaikal Sollum Pathai - A total of 23 short stories in Tamil 😍.
• Atomic Habits - An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (In Tamil Publication) (Currently Reading 📖)

List of things (Professional) I learned

• Docker
• Node, Express
• GraphQL
• What is Technical Committee 39 (TC39).
• Serverless
• Data Structures & Algorithms

Conclusion

All in all, I feel great this year than the previous year. I have accomplished a lot of things and I learned a lot too both professionally & personally. In 2020 I again have a huge list of things I want to accomplish and things I want to continually do every year.

So, thanks for reading, see you next year for the same.